This ongoing body of work started with the
impulse of an idea --- if you want your work to be relevant to the world, why
not make it out in the world?So,
with that premise and a wish to address issues of locality in the face of
today’s global culture I considered: What could be more local than the
streets of the place where you live?

The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan talks about the
effect of our senses in forming a personal experience of space and place.
Vision is vast, hearing is wide, smell is adjacent and touch is the most
intimate sense. Why not choose a site and literally feel my way across it…know
someplace by touching it and in the process generate a tactile record of both
the activity and the place. In other words, produce a recording where the
performative dimension of making becomes inscribed in the art object.

I wanted to produce a different type of
landscape image and like traditional landscape painters of the past, I sought
to immerse myself in a chosen location. I ended up turning my attention to a
pedestrian crosswalk and a parking space. I was attracted to the fact that they
are clearly marked and designated for a particular purpose, they are regulated
for shared use and they have time limits that govern how long someone can use
them - so by nature they are transitory sites.

For a few years, a crosswalk and parking
space have been my plein air workplace. Using multi-gauge aluminum
sheets and a variety of tools as recording devices, I’ve been gathering
detailed impressions of these areas of streetscape. I started out looking for
an alternative way to image the urban environment, yet the making phase of this
project, which required time spent working in the street, began to raise questions
related to labor and artistic production.

The next phase of the cycle was to bring the
streets indoors and reassemble the impressions to make a representation of the
original site. Unlike the original places, these recordings lack color.
Instead, they rely on the material qualities of aluminum to render a frank
pictorial description on a 1:1 scale. I’m interested in how these final “place
objects” function as mediators between our experiences of indoor and outdoor
space.